The crisis of the later Middle Ages did not distract the intellectuals and artists of Latin Christendom from theory and creativity. On the contrary, the gloom and doom of the times made them think all the more deeply about the nature of God, the universe, mankind, and society. In the midst of devastation from pandemics, war, climatic deterioration, and economic depression, they exhibited a passion for learning of all kinds—for linguistic and literary innovation, for philosophical and scientific inquiry, for massive productivity and creativity in the visual arts. No era in western civilization left a heritage of more masterpieces in literature and painting or seminal works of philosophy and theology.
A long series of great historians in the past century and half has sought to articulate the cultural dynamics of the period between 1270 and 1500 that generated so much intellectual, literary, and artistic innovation. Some have seen the cultural development of the period 1270–1500 as fitting into a pattern of intellectual and artistic revolution, of breakthrough renaissance. This was the thesis that Jacob Burckhardt propounded with regard to Italy in 1860, and others extended this interpretation more generally to all Europe. It was only a question of precisely when particular cultures were, like Burckhardt’s Renaissance Italy, freed from the “faith, illusion, and childish prepossession” of medieval society and the modern world was ushered in, signified by a full consciousness of individual human personality that broke the bonds of “race, people, party, family, or corporation”—that is, modernist individualism replaced medieval collectivity.
Another group of historians have seen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at least outside northern Italy, not a brilliant cultural dawning, but a rich autumnal glow, the maturation and fulfillment of the long medieval centuries. They have viewed late medieval culture as bringing to a conclusion the cultural revolution of the twelfth century, with its twin facets of classical recovery and romantic intensification. Some have emphasized a novel laicized spirit breaking through medieval religious structure, while others have focused on the revamping of medieval religiosity in the direction of personal piety resulting in the augmentation of ordinary people’s faith. “The diapason of life has not changed,” Johan Huizinga wrote in 1919 about the fifteenth century in France and the Netherlands. “Scholastic thought with symbolism and strong formalism, the thoroughly dualistic conception of life and the world still dominated. The two poles of the mind continued to be chivalry and hierarchy.”
Inevitably many historians have concluded that the period 1270–1500 was marked by two distinct cultures whose trends contradicted each other—Italy was breaking through to a cultural revolution, while northern Europe was bringing to term the ideas and sensibilities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, extending the implications and trying to resolve some of the conflicts of the great intellectual advances of that era. In this view, there was some interaction between the late medieval cultures of northern Europe and the Italian Renaissance, but they were going each their own way. It was not until the end of the fifteenth century that intense efforts were made to reconcile the two cultures, and these efforts produced a monumental intellectual and moral crisis around 1500 that brought on the Protestant Reformation.
Symbolically it is easy to relive the primary significance of the late medieval cultures because they are still active. In the span of a few hours an academic at Columbia or New York University can role-play two constants of the culturally upscale fifteenth-century experience. In the morning she can be a member of an examining panel giving an oral exam to a doctoral student in the humanities. In the afternoon (after lunch in a French or Italian restaurant whose cuisine as we know it goes back to the late fifteenth century), she can visit the Frick Museum or the Morgan Library of Art or a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum and enjoy the fabulous collection of art that a billionaire put together for his own edification. These are both reruns of cultural scenes of late medieval Europe—the doctoral oral replicated from the universities of Paris or Oxford or Padua, and the splendid private art collection replicated from many places, but especially Florence. Let us begin by looking at the implications of the scholastic exercise.
At the University of Paris in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, and soon at other centers such as Oxford and Cologne, scholastic theology reached the height of its development. The focal point of Christian thought and higher education was indisputably the University of Paris, where St. Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians taught and wrote. The university’s authority in matters of doctrine led kings and popes alike to appeal to its faculty for support in political and doctrinal controversies. Paris certainly was the leader in scholastic thought, but scholasticism itself was universal. St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura were Italians, and Italian universities were among the successors to Paris as centers of scholasticism. During the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the universities at Padua, Bologna, and Pavia flourished as centers for the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy, making full use of the comments and writings of the Arab philosopher Averroes. Between 1280 and 1320 Oxford was the most innovative center of philosophy.
Ultimately medieval theologians were unable to establish a common view of either the divine or the natural aspects of the Christian universe. The attempt by Thomas Aquinas to argue from the natural to the divine and thus to reconcile Aristotelian metaphysics with the Christian concept of God found opponents on every side. St. Bonaventura and his followers rejected Aquinas’s argument that man can arrive at a rational, if imperfect, knowledge of God by analogy from the natural world, arguing that knowledge of God comes from mystical communion with the divine, not from nature. On the other hand, the Christian followers of Averroes—the most distinguished Muslim commentator on the Aristotelian corpus—argued that man’s only sure knowledge comes from nature and that consequently he can have no secure knowledge of God by exercising reason. The most extreme Christian followers of Averroes held, as did Averroes himself, that philosophy and theology could contradict each other. The implication of this doctrine—that matters of faith could not be proved and were in fact contradicted by philosophy—was viewed as heretical by the more conservative churchmen.
The major outcome of the great Thomist age of synthesis was a reaction against it that shook scholastic philosophy to its foundations. As the fluid and even amorphous body of Christian doctrine that existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was subjected to the dual impact of Aristotle and the social and political disorders of the fourteenth century, the medieval worldview began gradually to break down. The philosophical issues bequeathed by the thirteenth century to the fourteenth proved impossible to solve. Philosophical schools, roughly divided between the Franciscan followers of St. Bonaventura and the Dominican followers of Aquinas, formulated precise and rigid definitions of orthodoxy. In 1277 the bishop of Paris declared that Aristotle could not be publicly taught or read at the university. Even while he was alive, Aquinas had incurred the disapproval of ecclesiastical authorities.
The study of Aristotle continued, however. Oxford was outside the ban, and even in Paris the prohibition could not be enforced. Censorship continued in the fourteenth century, with the objects of condemnation varying with the philosophical inclination of the censors. The prohibition of deviant opinions was unsuccessful, but it tended to harden doctrinal controversy. The late thirteenth-century academic controversies were mainly responsible for the separation of theology from philosophy and science. Philosophers and scientists continued to work within the framework of Christian doctrine, and their preoccupations were often ultimately theological, but the tensions between the different intellectual commitments grew more apparent.
The Oxford philosopher Duns Scotus (1266–1308) stressed the unknowability of God and the inaccessibility of His nature. Man’s knowledge of the natural world might come from sensory perception, but not his knowledge of the divine will or his own will to do good. Scotus thus tried to reconcile the Aristotelian view of knowledge derived from sensory perception with the orthodox Christian conception of a free and unlimited deity.
Duns Scotus was the greatest medieval logician. As his name implies, he was born in Scotland; he joined the Franciscan order, studied at Paris, and taught theology at Oxford. He began with an extremely searching inquiry into the power of the human intellect to abstract from sensory data and arrived at a conclusion contradicting Thomist optimism, which believed it possible to build up a rational knowledge of God on an epistemological foundation of sensory experience. Scotus concluded that the human mind cannot penetrate God’s being through ratiocination. God is infinite, but human reason is finite. God is absolutely omnipotent and free to follow His own will; the human mind cannot work out a train of causation to be able to know rationally the inner being of God. Scotus was not trying to undermine faith but to enhance its exclusive importance; he was trying to make revelation the only source of the knowledge of divine being. He thought that he had protected the majesty of God and the freedom of the will from the limiting effect of Thomistic determinism.
Duns Scotus died at the height of his intellectual powers and before he could complete his work. The major implications of his doctrine were worked out by William of Occam (died 1350), another Oxford Franciscan of extreme precocity who developed his system by 1320, when he was not more than thirty years old. Occam effected a revolution in scholastic philosophy by a complete separation of logic and metaphysics. This separation had already been suggested by Scotus, but Occam made the distinction absolute. He maintained that logic does not deal with being as such, with propositions from the standpoint of the accordance with fact or existence. Intellectual propositions are purely forms of thought divested of all metaphysical content, of any connection with ultimate truth. “Their being is their being understood.” Logic, then, deals only with the analysis of modes of signification, or “terms,” but when we ask if metaphysical knowledge is possible, if man can know ultimate truth rationally, Occam’s reply is negative. Universals are merely intellectual symbols, far removed from ultimate reality, that are formed by the mind out of repeated sensations and confused memory and that only dimly stand for individual things. Our conceptions of causality are contingent upon this mental process and have no reality outside the mind. Occam thereby arrived at an extreme nominalism that is close to the radical empiricism of Hume and Wittgenstein.
Occam’s purpose was the same as that of Scotus: He wanted to uphold the Franciscan claim that knowledge of God can come only through, revelation and intuition and that divine being cannot be known rationally, which for him would imply a limitation of divine being. He used philosophy to destroy the importance of philosophy and to uphold the Franciscan approach to the deity as the only way. His extreme nominalism, or “terminalism,” argued with enormous subtlety and force, immediately had a powerful effect on the schools that, by the 1330s, were the scene of a great debate between the Occamist “modernists,” as they were called, and the supporters of the Thomist “ancient way.”
Occam believed that he had used the dialectical weapons of the schools against the schoolmen. He had demonstrated that philosophy itself supported the teachings of St. Francis concerning the intuitive knowledge of God. Occam’s devotion to St. Francis made him susceptible to the doctrines of the radical wing of the Friars Minor. At the end of the thirteenth century the Spirituals had again become active, and they openly preached the apostolic poverty of the church and the apocalyptic heresies of Joachim of Flora. Not satisfied with his onslaught on Thomism, Occam began to attack the temporal power of the papacy and to demand the apostolic poverty of the church. He fell under the censure of Pope John XXII and spent the last years of his life at the court of the German king Louis of Bavaria, who was also at odds with the pope. Occam was joined in his flight to seek royal protection by the minister-general of the Franciscans, who had sided with the Spirituals and thereby finally opened the split within the order that had been threatening since the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1322 the papacy condemned the doctrine of the apostolic poverty of the church as a heresy, and the more extreme members of the Spirituals in Italy, known as the Fraticelli, were hunted down by the Inquisition. These conflicts inaugurated a sharp decline in the vitality of the Franciscan order and its leadership of European piety.
In the realm of science, Occam’s preference for the specific over the general gave great impetus to the development of a modern view of the investigation of nature. Observation had been recognized as the basis of scientific conclusions since the work of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. Grosseteste and his disciple Bacon stressed the importance of sensory perception and thus of observation and experiment. Their careers at Oxford were among the first to distinguish the English university—which was free from many of the harsh conflicts that limited the pursuit of scientific investigation at Paris—as the prime center of medieval scientific thought. During the early fourteenth century, Merton College at Oxford developed a school of mathematics unparalleled in Europe.
Early fourteenth-century scientists devoted themselves to pointing out and attempting to correct the manifest inaccuracies of Aristotelian physics. For all his empiricism, Aristotle’s conclusions often did not correspond with discernible facts. In the Aristotelian universe general cause—of motion, for example—was inherent in the nature of any object or force. In a hierarchically ordered universe, every object and every element (earth, water, air, and fire) sought its natural place. Occam, on the other hand, held that the only valid source of knowledge about the world is what is observable. Motion, for instance, cannot be said to exist; it is only a convenient term to express the fact that we see a thing first in one place and then in another. Therefore motion—and, indeed, general cause in the Aristotelian sense—was invalidly conceived.
The successors of Occam helped to set the stage for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century, but they were separated from the achievements of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton by their distinctly limited methods of experimentation and inadequate knowledge of quantification. Their assertions too often were shots in the dark—brilliant attempts at valid explanations that were neither refutable nor verifiable by the methods at their disposal. The bonds of the Aristotelian universe had been broken, but the new methods did not as yet lead to definitive results. No coherent scientific view of the universe, no paradigm, could be molded to replace the Aristotelian synthesis.
Occam concluded that while relations between individual things are mental products, the individual things themselves do exist and are knowable. Through simple sensory data the human mind can learn to perceive these individual, permanent things in nature, which are extended, quantitative, and measurable. Occam thus glimpsed that universe of discourse, based on the quantification of nature, that made the thought-world of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton possible. The Oxford Franciscan himself suggested the law of inertia, although among his contemporaries only the small group of natural philosophers at Merton College, Oxford, could understand what he was saying. In the latter half of the fourteenth century the Parisian Occamist school, following their master’s rejection of metaphysics and advocacy of the observation and analysis of individual things, advanced to the threshold of modern mechanics, physics, and analytic geometry. Nicholas of Oresme, undoubtedly the most outstanding member of this school, suggested the principle of the daily rotation of the Earth before Copernicus and proposed the law of falling bodies before Galileo.
Occam’s disciples thus had all the intellectual equipment to achieve the great scientific breakthrough of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Why did they not proceed with their work? Why did these scientific studies decline so completely in the fifteenth century that it has taken the most thorough research of modern scholarship to discover the work of Nicholas of Oresme and his colleagues? The answer lies in the social background in which these men worked. No one in the fourteenth century, not even the scholastic scientists themselves, perceived the empirical value and social utility of the law of falling bodies. The men who pursued these new studies did so on their own time; they had no social encouragement. There were no chairs in science in the universities, but there were many in dialectic and theology; it was much more profitable to pursue the latter disciplines than to engage in scientific research that no one, outside a small circle, appreciated. It was a change in military technology that eventually made mechanics a socially useful subject and encouraged the revival of research in the sixteenth century. Gunpowder was just coming into use in the fourteenth century, and Europeans were still unskilled and amateurish in its use. By the sixteenth century armies had become sufficiently adept at firing cannonballs so that someone who could devise a formula for falling projectiles could make a contribution whose empirical value could be understood.
The second factor that frustrated the great scientific movement of the fourteenth century was a deficiency in mathematical knowledge, particularly algebra. The late medieval thinkers knew that natural science required the quantification of natural phenomena, but they could implement this goal only in a fragmentary way.
Without a breakthrough to modern science, what were liable to be the more innovative kinds of intellectual pursuits in northern Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Prominently mysticism, which came in several varieties. One was the philosophical approach in the early fourteenth century of Nicholas of Cusa, derived from Occamism and Averroism: God was completely free and outside nature. Only the direct communion of the individual with God would reveal to him the divine will. Nicholas of Cusa called this doctrine appropriately “learned unknowing.”
A second kind of practical mysticism, popular in Germany and evoked in the writings of Master Eckhardt and Johannes Tauler, was a humble but firm expression of a puritanical, hard-working, prayerful, and quiet private life. The Pennsylvania Amish are direct heirs of this German quietism.
A third stream in late medieval northern mysticism is found in Thomas à Kempis’s the Imitation of Christ, the classic text of the Modern Devotion movement in the Netherlands, founded by Gerhard Groote. The Imitation of Christ, a popular Christian homily, is a variance of experiential New Age Christianity. The taking of the sacrament of the Eucharist in an expectant mental state of upbeat piety and prayerfulness engenders a conviction of union with Christ. Kempis commanded obedience to prelates so he aroused no concern of counterorthodoxy. But he was diluting the sacramental nature of Christianity through a doing and feeling kind of middle-class sentimentality. No doubt this is the kind of faith that many ordinary people were seeking in the fifteenth century, and this current in late medieval religion flowed easily into the evangelical wing of Protestantism in the next century.
A much-cultivated intellectual pursuit in the late medieval world was elaborate criticism of the clergy, not infrequently written by a priest himself. If this criticism was cultivated intensively and imaginatively enough, it became a subculture of its own, the center of a quasi-paranoid worldview by which everything else could be understood. When the Jews were expelled from western Europe and driven eastward into the Slavic cauldron, the Latin clergy themselves became the demonic scapegoats of European culture.
The most febrile text of late medieval anticlericalism was Piers Plowman, attributed to a London cleric, William Langland. This long poem, which has survived in three different versions, has all sorts of apocalyptic dimensions, but bitter and circumstantial criticism of the clergy is what makes it a compelling work of literature.
I saw the Friars there too—all four Orders of them—preaching to the people for what they could get. In their greed for fine clothes, they interpreted the Scriptures to suit themselves and their patrons. . . .
There was also a Pardoner, preaching like a priest. He produced a document covered with Bishops’ seals, and claimed to have power to absolve all the people from broken fasts and vows of every kind. The ignorant fold believed him and were delighted. They came up and knelt to kiss his documents, while he, blinding them with letters of indulgence thrust in their faces, raked in their rings and jewelry with his roll of parchment!—So the people give their gold to support these gluttons, and put their trust in dirty-minded scoundrels. . . .
Then I hear parish priests complaining to the Bishop that since the Plague their parishes were too poor to live in; so they asked permission to live in London, where they could traffic in Masses, and chime their voices to the sweet jingling of silver. [Trans. S. F. Goodridge]
Another popular cultural current in the late Middle Ages was cultivation of the old traditions of romantic chivalry. Aristocratic court life in the fifteenth century became extremely stylized and immensely more expensive with the obsessive profileration of rituals, games, pageants, and feasts. On the imagined model of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, kings and dukes established tightly selected orders of chivalry carrying titles like Order of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece. A great deal of time, money and artistic, costuming, and cuisinary ingenuity was devoted to the ceremonial activities of these privileged orders. Tournaments were no longer loosely organized war games. They were now minutely choreographed exhibitions of individual prowess and refined sadistic taste.
The aristocratic chivalric displays of the latter Middle Ages were intended to give to the life-style of the higher nobility an intrinsic social value so that the vast expense, thought, and imagination and the best artistic skills lavished on their life-style were justifiably expended. This was the way the nobility blocked status declension in the face of the disposable capital and leisure time of the great merchants and some governmental officials of plebeian lineage.
The affluent and highly literate class of country and town gentry, merchants, and lesser clergy were not, however, willing to allow the aristocracy to reserve neoromantic traditions exclusively for themselves. As much as they could, middle-class people sought to participate in chivalric culture. This desire accounts for the immense resurgence in the popularity of Arthurian literature. Ordinary people could at least read about King Arthur, Queen Geneviere, and Sir Lancelot even if they lacked the resources and the status to dress and behave like these models of nobility. A retired English mercenary soldier and sometime professional bandit, Sir Thomas Mallory, retold the old stories in a rousing Camelot synthesis, Morte d’Arthur, that was the most popular book in the English language in the late fifteenth century and one of the first to come off the new London printing press.
The chivalric enthusiasm of the latter Middle Ages made the devastating and ruinously expensive Hundred Years’ War socially palatable, glazing it over with romantic motifs, both in the conduct of the war and in the official history of it written by Froissart, an English courtier. Froissart glamorized terrorism and massacres as a series of Camelot encounters and turned blue-blooded thugs like Edward the Black Prince into golden heroes of the Lancelot mold.
Yet another intellectual pursuit in a culturally deadlocked context wherein theological-philosophical syntheses had disintegrated and the quantified paradigms of modern science had not yet been determined, was low level social criticism—descriptions and commentaries about the lives, foibles, and petty triumphs and tragedies of men and women in various social groups and occupations. Today we call it tabloid journalism. It was immensely popular both with the middle class (it was instructive as well as amusing) and the nobility (they could look down with disdain on what the little people were doing).
The bestseller in this genre was the long book in English rhyme, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in London about 1380. Chaucer was a high-level customs official, a member of the entourage of the richest duke, and a well-traveled royal diplomat. He witnessed the lives of all sorts of people, from the grandees of the royal court down to dockside workers. He had an active sex life himself and a keen interest in women’s lives. Among his array of characters are the very perfect, gentle knight; the poor scholar and teacher; the prioress who spoke bad French and sang through her nose; and, as the audience demanded, a wide retinue of scrofulous and greedy clerics. Chaucer’s most successful character, today worth a sitcom of her own, was the Wife of Bath, married five times and a perpetual pilgrim because she enjoyed the touring ambience. Chaucer was a skillful poet and a master of European literary traditions—he was immensely learned and he drew upon this learning and literary mastery in his writing. But essentially he had the mind and temperament of a journalist. Within a framework of ostensible rigid affirmation of traditional ethics, he was interested in depicting the diversity and idiosyncracies of people’s lives and how they operated at the margins of traditional ethics. He sensed that this is what the literary marketplace demanded.
A writer of similar journalistic instincts and another insightful social commentator was Christine de Pizan, who lived in Paris in the early fifteenth century in the gloomy time of the Hundred Years’ War. Christine was the daughter of an Italian astrologer whom the French king had hired, but had to become a career woman after her father’s untimely death. Her steady job was as a manuscript copyist, but she was also successful in pioneering women’s journalism. Her best book was The City of Woman, in which the life of women in various social groups is minutely described. The book is written with a subtle tongue in cheek and delicate fake piety and a subliminal feminist mindset.
Chaucer’s and Christine’s literary achievements were paralleled by the Flemish painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who worked on commission from their patrons among the nobility and great merchants. Like Chaucer’s and Christine’s writing, the art of the Flemish painters was fundamentally a secular enterprise that aimed to satisfy a market.
The two greatest early Flemish masters were Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, who—along with their predecessors, the Master of Flemalle and Hubert van Eyck—were responsible for developing the Flemish style. Detailed realism characterizes the work of Jan van Eyck. His “Madonna of Chancellor Rollin” shows the chancellor kneeling before the Madonna and Child. A window behind the central figures looks out on a city depicted in minute detail. Jan van Eyck’s preoccupation with detail gave his work a static, serene quality that contrasts with the structural dynamism and emotion in the paintings of Roger van der Weyden. Oil had been used in paints before, but Jan van Eyck contributed the technique of applying layers of translucent oil paint over the base colors, which allowed the full exploitation of highlights and provided an impression of depth that heightened the color. Although their work was largely free from Italian influence, the great Flemish artists exploited the principles of perspective, which had been transmitted from Italy to the Franco-Flemish manuscript illuminators of the fourteenth century.
The subject matter of the Flemish masters ranged from the traditional religious themes found in manuscript illumination to portraiture, which allowed them to concentrate on the individual personality. Portraits became a popular and most lucrative art form; by the end of the fifteenth century the renowned portrait painter Hans Memling had become one of the richest men in his city through the generosity of his patrons.
The philosophers, writers, and artists of northern Europe in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were significantly influenced by the Italians. But Italy was still special, still different. Its culture was unique and in some regards revolutionary.
The essentials of the Italian cultural style of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries are closely identified with the movement known as humanism. The term humanism has been used to denote many kinds of ideas and activities, but it has two major (and compatible) meanings. First, there is social (sometimes called civic) humanism, which describes the outlook of the upper middle class in the Italian cities during the Renaissance. The upper bourgeoisie, glorying in its new political power, expressed its independence by placing great emphasis on human autonomy and on the value and grandeur of the city-state. The new class imitated the French aristocracy of the thirteenth century, taking up the aristocratic education, style, and courtly life that they considered suitable to their own emancipation and to their equality with the northern aristocrats. Social humanism inspired a passionate civic patriotism, a belief that all urban resources should be applied to the defense and beautification of the republican commune.
The second major aspect of humanism was the intellectual movement, based on Platonic philosophy, which emphasized the primacy of human values and individual creativity over feudal and ecclesiastical traditions and institutions. Humanist philosophers believed that the human mind was capable of deciding for itself without relying on traditional authority. In both its social and intellectual aspects, humanism drew strength and inspiration from the Greek and Roman classics, which taught the value of the city-state and its self-governing urban elite and upheld the critical powers of the individual human mind.
Both northern and Italian humanists applied their learning and philosophy to the study of the Scriptures, as well as the ancient classics. Most Italian humanists were devout Christians, enthusiastic about the possibility of applying critical methods to biblical studies. Many of them aimed at some form of Christian Platonism. The humanist emphasis on individualism did not necessarily result in secularism; it was also directed toward mysticism, an individual, personal relationship to God. Humanists were not necessarily antipapal; in fact, Rome became an intellectual and artistic center during the Renaissance. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, several popes—notably Pius II—were humanists themselves, as well as patrons of the arts.
Thus the term humanism, which is used to characterize an international intellectual and philosophical movement that was particularly suited to the Italian elite, denotes not only the study of the humanities, but certain assumptions about man’s place in the universe and the proper direction of human moral and rational capacities. Scholars in the Middle Ages became familiar with the classical tradition, but saw it ultimately as an alien and pagan view of the world. The men of the Renaissance were able to study that tradition with complete empathy for the first time. Humanism advocated an educational system in which classical studies were the curriculum for moral as well as intellectual training.
The culture of the Italian Renaissance was closely tied to conditions in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. The wealth of Italy, the matrix of social relationships, the character of political life in the Italian city-state, and the more remote impact of Roman cultural traditions all played important roles in shaping the character of the Italian cultural revolution. The structure of Italian society allowed the Renaissance to develop as a pervasive cultural mode, rather than the isolated expression of a few geniuses. For every Petrarch or Giotto, there were hundreds of lesser men who studied and imitated their works or served as patrons of art and letters.
The two aspects of Italian society that most clearly distinguished Italy from the rest of Europe were wealth—its quantity and the means by which it was amassed—and the political structure of the city-state. By the latter part of the thirteenth century, Italy had a money economy based on trade and finance. The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw the rise of the great banking houses. The pope was the bankers’ largest single customer in Europe, since he needed an agency for the deposit and transfer of vast church funds. Money was lent in sometimes staggering sums to kings and merchants and nobles. The surest investment was provided by merchants’ enterprises, since impecunious kings and nobles were a notoriously bad risk. Often the banks had widespread trading connections in addition to their purely financial interests.
Next to the bankers in magnitude of wealth were the international merchants, and below them were the lesser traders and merchants. The merchant-artisan was in a separate and lower class, and a frequent source of disorder. The man of means invested in land—often extensively—but land was not a primary source of the fortunes of the wealthy Italian families of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The elite of Italian society differed in many ways from the feudal nobility of northern Europe. Neither a life of leisure nor the security of heredity played as pervasive a role among the upper class in Italy as it did in northern Europe. French noblemen had for centuries lived as courtiers on the income from landed estates and offices, but Italian wealth was not so stable. One generation, or even a few years, could destroy a mercantile enterprise that had been built up with endless pains. The vicissitudes of business had a powerful impact on the income of wealthy Italian families—economic disasters were common liabilities in Italian life. Thus even the wealthiest families needed heirs with the ability to handle family finances, and sons of great magnates were trained for business enterprise. Careers in civil or canon law or international commerce were not frowned upon; they were the necessary foundation for economic and social prominence.
The fluid and sometimes fragile nature of wealth had a profound impact upon social relationships. Although only a few great families held sway at the top of Italian society at any one time, there was a fair amount of social mobility in Italian life. The oldest families were not always the wealthiest and often traded their good breeding for the cold cash of the nouveaux riches through marriage. Every city had its share of self-made men who, in a single lifetime, were able to amass wealth and power through ability and energy. There might also be a vast disparity between the wealth and prestige of different branches of the same family. Few men felt secure enough to consume the family fortunes placidly: The life of an Italian noble was filled with activity and struggle.
The political structure of the Italian cities also had a significant effect on social and cultural life. In the tyrannies established in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, effective political and military power in the city-state rested in the hands of one man, the podestà, the holder of power. The political stability so essential to the well-being of the merchant could collapse overnight with the podestà’s death or defeat. At the same time, the ordinary merchant was isolated from political life. Policy and power were the domain of the prince and his personal associates—in his court. The prince gathered around him those who were useful because of their practical abilities or desirable because of the luster they could add to his image.
The tenor of Italian courtly life has been preserved in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. The courtier was supposed to be, above all, a gentleman: a man of good breeding, physically attractive, and accomplished in all things. He was to be a good warrior, proficient at games and tournaments, a man of art and letters. Good at everything, he yet must refrain from obvious effort, from an excess of enthusiasm, and from boasting. It was quite respectable to finish the race in the middle of the field, though never last. The search for honor and glory must not mar the effect of graceful speech and conduct.
The Renaissance gentleman of Castiglione’s portrait differs from the chivalric knight of medieval tradition (and of northern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) in his intellectual pursuits; the careful rhetorical style of his speech; his easy references to Cicero, Aristotle, and the ancient heroes; and his sophisticated opinions on the writings of Petrarch and Dante and on contemporary paintings and sculptures. He differed from the ideal Christian knight in his preoccupation with finite rewards: his own glory and advancement and that of his patron. The ultimate function of the courtier was to guide his patron by personal excellence and sound advice.
The late fifteenth-century popes, many of whom were noted humanists, established great Renaissance courts that were peopled with leading writers and artists. St. Peter’s Church and the papal library, among the other Roman monuments, attest to the wealth and the exquisite taste of popes who were poets and patrons, rather than saints.
Both the princely courts and the Italian republics regarded themselves as continuers of the Roman political tradition: Whereas the princes were the heirs of the Caesars, bringing peace and civilization out of chaos and ignorance, the republics sought to restore the glories of the Roman Republic, so beautifully idealized in the writings of Cicero. The greatest flowering of the Renaissance came not in the princely states, nor even in the papal court with its vast resources, but in republican Florence.
In the fourteenth century, Florence survived the ravages of plague, civil war, the fall of the major banking houses, and the revolt of the lower classes to rebuild republican institutions and expand its trade once again. The old oligarchy lost leadership to newer wealth—to bankers, lawyers, and international merchants in the greater guilds. The offices of government were placed in the hands of a series of councils, in which membership was restricted primarily to members of the guilds. The lower middle class and the old nobility were given minor roles in government, where they were neither so frustrated as to rebel nor so powerful as to hinder seriously the new oligarchy. In practice, the offices of government rotated among the members of a hundred or so wealthy and respectable families, the precise position of any family depending upon its wealth, ability, and political connections at any given time.
In the early fifteenth century, diplomatically and militarily isolated, Florence stood alone against the attempts of the dictator of Milan to reduce all northern and central Italy to subjection. The members of the ruling oligarchy restrained their habitual factional bickering to meet the threat and imposed a system of direct, graduated taxes on themselves. Workers who lived off their wages were classed as paupers and not taxed. The result of the struggle was the victorious assertion of the republican institutions and ideology of Florence.
Civic patriotism and humanist ideals characterized political and intellectual life in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century. Participation in government was a necessary concomitant to economic success because the unrepresented or unpopular family found that it bore the full burden of taxation. The sons of the oligarchies sought to excel in business, government, or church administration, and for success in any one of these fields, the tastes of the time required a humanist man of letters with the proper oratorical style. Leading artists and writers were public heroes.
The houses of wealthy Florentine humanists were tangible proof of the wealth and refinement of their owners. Artistic masterpieces, classical and modern, were supplemented by manuscript libraries with beautiful copies of Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle, and other great classical authors. The household staff was often adorned by a Greek or Latin tutor, a highly respected addition to the usual array of servants. Wealthy private citizens and the city government commissioned works of art to commemorate great persons and events. This was the great age of ecclesiastical building in Florence, as well as in Rome and other Italian cities. Civic patriotism demanded beautiful buildings, the finest Latin style in public documents, and literary works describing the long and glorious history of the city. Professional scholars of the highest renown taught at the university in Florence, which was known throughout Europe as a great center of the New Learning.
The height of the Renaissance spirit in Florence was reached during the reign of the Medici family, whose wealth came from the famous Medici bank, which was founded in the late fourteenth century and had branches all over Europe. The Medici were able to obtain the banking business of the papacy, which had been left without an adequate banker by the fall of the great Florentine banks earlier in the century. At that time the Medici were known as supporters of the popular party in Florence and were thus political enemies of powerful houses in the ruling oligarchy. For many years the Medici family was forced to pay outrageously high taxes, and opposition to the Medici continued to grow—but so did their power.
The outstanding manager of the bank and the architect of the political takeover of the government of Florence was Cosimo de’Medici. After a year in exile Cosimo returned to Florence as the effective power behind the workings of the Florentine government. Commissions and councils continued to sit, and new officials continued to be drawn from a rigid lottery. The difference was that no man could rise in office nor any family continue in prosperity without the sufferance of Cosimo de’Medici. Families who had once used the taxing power of government to lash the Medici found themselves taxed into ruin and denied the credit essential for their commercial enterprises.
The rule of the Medici fostered Florentine humanism. Cosimo was the patron par excellence; cultural life reached new heights under his sponsorship. And if Cosimo was liberal, his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent, the last great Medici ruler of Florence, was lavish. Lorenzo was not the banker or the statesman that Cosimo had been, however. He was unable to reverse the decline in the fortunes of the family bank—although he covered it for a time with funds drawn from the public treasury (a not entirely unjustified action in view of the public expenditures made from Medici funds). In the early sixteenth century, a Medici pope continued the tradition of patronage begun by his predecessors, but the wealth and finally the real power of the Medici had disappeared by the end of the fifteenth century. In 1500, Renaissance culture had just begun to suffer from the economic decline of the Mediterranean world that eventually would relegate Italy to a secondary place in European life.
The situation in Florence was, in many ways, a concentrated example of the Renaissance environment of all Italian cities. Professional and amateur humanists existed side by side. Professors, tutors, and professional artists were inseparable from Renaissance gentlemen, who often made outstanding contributions of art and letters while conducting their more mundane political and mercantile affairs. Although a large part of the Italian contribution to classical studies, art, and letters was absorbed by the academic circles in northern Europe, the Renaissance as a comprehensive cultural mode found its full expression only in the Italian cities.
The Italian Renaissance was a diversified cultural outpouring that extended to every facet of the intellectual and artistic life of the Italian elite. It was a cultural movement, rather than an intellectual revolution as such. It did not contribute to western civilization a new paradigm for ordering man’s conception of the universe or his experience, as did the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Rather it contributed a new style of life and a new educational ideal. By reemphasizing certain aspects of the western tradition, the Renaissance created a new cultural mode that was to dominate the ideas of the European elite for centuries and that accelerated the erosion of the medieval worldview. The particular character and direction of the Renaissance were due, in large measure, to the formative influence of a few great men, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
These men’s scholarly achievements and experiments in literary form and style exerted an enormous influence on the development of humanist letters. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was in many ways a transitional figure. Dante has often been depicted as the poet who put the Summa Theologica in verse, as a fervent disciple of Thomas Aquinas. There are plausible grounds for this view; undoubtedly Dante was heavily influenced by Thomistic doctrine. But he was also sympathetic to some of the views of the Averroists, and in his approach to political thought there is a new note of radical voluntarism that strongly contradicts Thomistic political doctrine. Dante was a man of prodigious learning and deep piety. But the radicalism of the northern Italian communes is also manifested in his work. He was reaching out to new intellectual horizons that were not yet clearly perceptible. He oscillated between the extremes of traditional medieval doctrine and audacious radicalism, signifying the dilemma of the new generation of late medieval thinkers.
Dante was a Florentine who spent the last twenty years of his life in exile from his native city, which he loved deeply, as a consequence of one of those interminable political feuds that poisoned the life of the northern Italian communes. He was the creator of the Italian vernacular as a literary language. He brought into Italian literature the romantic motifs that had prevailed in French poetry for over a century, and in his lyrics there is that same subtle intertwining of mundane and spiritual love upon which the French and German romances had already been built. He venerated Virgil and the great names of classic Latin literature and was a pioneer in uniting humanism with romanticism.
Dante’s most ambitious work, The Divine Comedy, has generally been regarded as the greatest medieval poem. It is an allegorical epic based upon prodigious learning and almost incomparable literary craftsmanship. It has been viewed as the summation of medieval orthodox religious thought and as a presentation in allegorical and poetical form of the chief tenets of Thomism. There is much to commend this interpretation. Dante describes how he was led on a journey from the depths of Hell, through Purgatory and Heaven, to the glory of the beatific vision. His three guides on this journey symbolize the three ascending stages of knowledge. Virgil takes him through the circles of Hell to the lower stages of Purgatory; the Roman poet whom Dante idolized is meant to represent reason, which by its own efforts can sufficiently educate men in the good life to escape damnation. Dante is guided through the higher stages of Purgatory and all but the highest circles of Heaven by a certain Beatrice. A woman of this name did play an important part in Dante’s life, although they seldom met and she became the wife of a wealthy Florentine banker. Beatrice came to symbolize for Dante the romantic ideal of secular and spiritual love, and in The Divine Comedy she is meant to represent Grace or Divine Love, that is, revelation or the church, whose sacraments are the only way to salvation and admission to Heaven. Finally, to come face to face with the Divine Spirit, the guidance of St. Bernard, who symbolizes the mystical experience, is necessary. There is a rough parallel between this scheme of religious pilgrimage and Thomistic doctrine. At least St. Thomas and Dante agreed on the ability of reason to show men the rudiments of the good life and the necessity of the church for fulfilling this potentiality and for understanding the higher truths. Dante’s designation of Bernardine mysticism as the highest form of knowledge is derived from Franciscan teaching much more than from Dominican Thomism. Appropriately, St. Francis and St. Dominic appear in the same circle of Heaven, and the poem ends with a prayer to the Virgin.
There are some aspects of The Divine Comedy, however, that are sharply at variance with its generally orthodox and traditional teaching. Siger of Brabant, the Averroist antagonist of St. Thomas Aquinas, turns up in Dante’s Heaven. There are many expressions of hostility to the claims of the papacy. Dante puts into the mouth of St. Peter a bitter condemnation of the “rapacious wolves, in garb of shepherd” who have betrayed their office, and he was particularly uncomplimentary to his contemporary Boniface VIII, whom he consigned to Hell. In Dante’s view it is regrettable that Constantine ever made his Donation to the pope and thereby involved the vicar of Christ in worldly matters. There is a more profound limitation to Dante’s orthodoxy, and it lies in the scheme of salvation that he presents. His literary concretization of traditional medieval religiosity, its vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, reflects an overfamiliarity with this doctrine of salvation and the beginnings of its ultimate exhaustion. The poetic construction of such a detailed picture of religious cosmology indicates that the traditional doctrines have lost their freshness and vitality and have become conventional stereotypes. That is not to say that Dante did not believe in the Catholic view of salvation, but he so internalized these doctrines that the line between literary imagination and theological reality became indistinct.
The radical implications of Dante’s thought are more pronounced in his treatise on Monarchy, which was ostensibly written to advocate the rights and powers of the emperor in Italy, to whom Dante looked as the rightful ruler of Italy and as the restorer of his personal fortunes. As a matter of fact, the German king Henry VII did come down into Italy during Dante’s lifetime, but he immediately turned around and went back again without doing anything to end Dante’s exile from his beloved Florence. The significance of the work does not lie in its traditional arguments from law and historical tradition on the superior authority of the Roman emperor in the world, but rather in its novel attitude. Dante makes favorable allusions to the Averroist doctrine of the collective immortality of the soul, which stand in strange contradiction to his view of personal immortality upon which The Divine Comedy is based. He debates the traditional papal interpretation of the Petrine biblical text, claiming that from Christ’s words to Peter “it does not follow that the pope can loose or bind the decrees of the empire.” He denies the validity of papal claims based on the Donation of Constantine because “Constantine had no power to alienate the imperial dignity, nor had the church power to receive it.” Most significant is Dante’s argument for imperial authority, not only on the basis of tradition, law, and biblical texts, but from a simple and radical doctrine of pragmatic necessity: The welfare of the human race, he says, is best advanced under monarchical rule. This represents a new departure in medieval political thought. The implication of Dante’s argument is that political power is based upon the sanction not only of divine and natural law but of social necessity.
Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), much more than Dante, was a man of the high Renaissance. His love sonnets were written to Laura, the object of his unending but unrequited love, but they deal above all with his own state of mind. Petrarch was constantly concerned with his soul, his emotions, his intellect, and his reputation. He epitomized the self-consciousness of the Renaissance man. Yet Petrarch was also deeply religious, concerned about his own salvation and the defense of orthodoxy. His writings were often marked by reference to Christian literature—Augustine’s Confessions was one of his favorite works—and Christian dogma. For Petrarch, however, piety did not mean self-denial or self-abasement before the mystery and mastery of God; he saw self-fulfillment as a Christian duty. Petrarch did not consider the things of the world to be works of the devil. He valued worldly things and man himself as evidences of the divine on Earth. For Petrarch, concern with himself and with humanity was truly Christian.
As a classicist Petrarch gained an unparalleled reputation in his own day, and although by the refined standards of the later Renaissance his Latin was less than pure Ciceronian, he was the foremost man of letters in fourteenth-century Italy. He was an avid manuscript hunter and had an impressive library. Unable to learn Greek for lack of a teacher, he nonetheless valued his manuscripts of Plato’s writings and was active in the search for translators and teachers of Greek. Petrarch was not merely concerned with the language and style of the classics, however; he found the Stoicism and civic patriotism of Cicero and other great Romans wholly in keeping with the ideal behavior of a Christian gentleman and citizen.
The greatest of Petrarch’s associates was Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), another eager manuscript hunter and Latin stylist. Like Petrarch and Dante, Boccaccio had his perpetually unsuccessful love affair. But Boccaccio’s love, even more than Petrarch’s, was a love of frustrated desire involving little idealization. His passion was expressed not only in admiration of his beloved but in the bitterness of betrayal.
Boccaccio thought of himself as primarily a Latin poet, but his greatest contribution to European literature was the Decameron. Written in vernacular prose, the Decameron is a series of stories told by a group of young women and gentlemen who have gone to the hills outside Florence to escape the plague. There is little apparent didactic purpose to the tales. Some are funny, some are sad, and many are marked with satire or ribaldry. Their major purpose was not to educate but to entertain.
Writings in the vernacular did not play the major role in the literature of the time. Both Petrarch and Boccaccio spent the greater part of their energies cultivating their Latin and their knowledge of classical literature. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the main drive of Italian culture was in the direction of classical studies. In the universities, chairs of rhetoric were established so that scholars might lecture on the classical masterpieces, on the style and grace of the language and the worthiness of the ideas set forth by the great classical authors. The ability to speak and write properly was the distinctive mark of an educated man, and in the hands of men like Petrarch, classical Latin once more became a supple and graceful vehicle of expression.
The study of Greek was more difficult for the Italians, since teachers were rare and complete Greek texts almost unknown at the beginning of the Renaissance. After 1400, chairs for the study of Greek were established in most Italian universities, and subsequently good Latin translations of Greek works began to appear. Later, after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, many Greek scholars migrated to Italy. Their learning and the manuscripts they brought with them made a substantial contribution to classical studies.
The rarity of complete and accurate manuscripts of the most important works of antiquity led to a search for manuscripts that took scholars to Byzantium and to monasteries all over Europe. When manuscripts were located, they were often in poor condition. Classical scholars were forced to become experts in textual criticism, collecting and collating available manuscripts to put together as complete and accurate a text as possible. Perhaps the greatest expert on the critical evaluation of manuscripts was Lorenzo Valla (died 1457), who brooked no compromise with the evidence presented in the texts. He proved conclusively, for example, that the Donation of Constantine was a medieval forgery. Even the rage of ecclesiastical officials did not deter Valla from publishing the conclusions derived from his study of textual evidence. The groundwork of modern philology and textual criticism was laid by the scholars of the Renaissance.
Classical literature as we know it today was first assembled by Renaissance scholars. The possession of complete and accurate manuscripts of many ancient thinkers, including Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle, had a profound impact on the study of the classical authors. Many writers had previously been known to the Middle Ages only through one or two of their works, and even Aristotle, whose major works had been translated in the thirteenth century, now became better known as the full corpus of his writing was made available. With full texts at hand, it was possible for the first time for scholars to evaluate critically the writings of the great authors of antiquity. The result was often a revolutionary change in attitude toward their works.
A consequence of the impact of the New Learning was the enhancement of the reputation of Plato. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Platonic corpus was successfully assimilated into humanist thought through the work of Marsilio Ficino (died 1499). Under the patronage of Cosimo de’Medici, Ficino founded the Florentine Academy, an informal school of writers and artists that was devoted to the full comprehension and assimilation of the works of Plato. Ficino himself made the most successful synthesis of the philosophy of Plato, asserting that there was one universal truth and that all valid philosophies partook of at least a part of it. Ficino’s interpretation of the Platonic universe was ideally suited to give a philosophical underpinning to the humanistic view of man. Ficino believed that the human soul lay midway between the carnal and the divine and could choose between the lower and the higher course.
The greatest follower of Ficino, Pico della Mirandola (died 1494), carried his teacher’s belief in the compatibility of all great philosophical and theological systems to a new extreme. Pico lived only thirty-one years, but became one of the most learned men of his day, mastering Hebrew as well as Greek and Latin. He then embarked upon a synthesis of all knowledge into one system, asserting that Christian, Jewish, and pagan thought did not contradict one another in essentials. Pico was a keen student of the Jewish Kabbalah.
The humanist philosophy was wholly compatible with the outlook of the Italian upper class. The secular educational system developing in Italian cities was directed toward education in the humanities—that is, in art and letters—to prepare the young man of good family to take his place in society. The young man’s goal was not to become a highly trained scholar, but to develop the proper social values and the right forms of expression. He was more concerned with ethics than with philosophy or theology. The search for truth was an accepted value, but it was not isolated from secular concerns. Rather, the student was supposed to become a man of affairs, a citizen who took an active part in public matters. With a few notable exceptions, even professional scholars and teachers did not exclude themselves from public life; they were in great demand as secretaries and ambassadors.
The secular and classical attitudes that characterized humanist thought, and the examples of the Italian city-states, exerted a profound influence on the development of political theory in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thomas Aquinas had asserted a fundamental harmony between the temporal state and the divine. Renaissance thinkers amended Aquinas to perceive the state as an end in itself, with its own purpose. The first treatise on political theory by a Renaissance thinker was the Monarchy of Dante. Dante saw the state as an essentially secular institution whose independence from spiritual authority was essential to its well-being.
In 1324 the appearance of the Defender of the Peace of Marsilio of Padua brought forth a storm of controversy that did not die down for over a century. Marsilio’s beliefs were tinged with Averroism (which he imbibed while a student and teacher at the University of Paris), leading him to assert the absolute separation of the secular and the spiritual, and he was vehemently anticlerical. He denied the authority of the pope and of the church in secular affairs on the ground that these were purely temporal concerns, outside the jurisdiction of the papacy. He further held that the absolute authority of the pope was a tyrannous usurpation and that the supreme authority in the church lay with the entire community of believers.
In the more positive aspects of his work, Marsilio relied heavily upon Aristotle, asserting that the proper end of the state was the provision of peace and security for its citizens. Marsilio was a thoroughgoing republican, defining the law as the expression of the will of the weightier (that is, worthier, wealthier) part of the citizenry and the true expression of the common good. Men as individuals were prone to evil, but the collective opinion of the citizens must necessarily result in the common good. In his voluntarist concept of law, Marsilio recognized the need to provide some other principle upon which the state could demand obedience if it did not claim to be the expression of divine will. He asserted that the transcendent end of the state—the common good—commanded the obedience of the citizens and that the consent of the citizens bound them to obey the laws, in theory and in practice. Thus Marsilio laid the foundation for the modern doctrine of sovereignty.
Although the departure from the clerical view of the state preoccupied much of Renaissance thought, the political experience of the Italian city-states was another important influence on the Renaissance concept of government. After Florence had successfully withstood the invasion of the Milanese tyrants, for example, the Florentine Republic became the subject of numerous works that glorified its history and propounded the political principles of republican Rome. Florentine writers believed that the public spirit of the citizens—inherited from their distant ancestors in the Roman Republic—and the excellence of the republican constitution were responsible for the political strength and cultural glories of Florence. The writing of Cicero and the example set by Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of the tyrant Caesar, were woven into the political ideology of the Florentine government. This concept of the high moral aim of the state in republican Florence had its parallel in the political ideology of the podestàs of Italy, who claimed to be the perpetuators of the Pax Romana of the age of Augustus. The tyrants held that only a universal monarch (or at least a national Italian monarchy) could ensure the peace necessary for the earthly well-being of mankind. Neither Florence nor the tyrannies, however, consistently practiced their high-sounding principles.
Despite the theoretical pronouncements of humanist writers, the political life of the Italian city-states was as sordid as any in Europe, and a much more pessimistic view of the state dominated the writings of the greatest political thinker of the Renaissance, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527). Machiavelli wrote about politics from firsthand experience as a Florentine diplomat and administrator. In addition, he had read the works of Aristotle and the writings of Latin authors on the history of Rome and the political ideals of republican Rome. His works—among them The Prince, dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent as a manual of government; the Discourses, a commentary on Roman history written to illustrate the political principles that could be learned from the past; and the History of Florence—express a purely secular attitude. Beyond that, they show Machiavelli as a man who distrusted all ideals. He strove to show things as they were, not as they ought to be, “for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation.”
Machiavelli thought that religion was necessary in the state to secure the obedience of subjects and that the corrupt example of the papal court had destroyed the morals of the Italian people. For Machiavelli, the struggle for power was the essence of politics. The only constant in human affairs was perpetual change. The most adaptable political organism was the most durable. The state was not a reflection of hierarchical order or theological principles; its appropriateness and durability depended not upon moral purpose, but on the successful monopoly of power.
Machiavelli had a fundamentally pessimistic—or realistic—view of human nature, tempered by a firm belief that man was the most creative force in the universe and, in fact, the only force for effecting change. He did not commit himself on the ideal form of government any more than on its moral end, since any government was only a transient organism that eventually would disintegrate through its own weakness or the challenge of a superior force. In The Prince he asserted that only the strong government of a single man could save Italy from the throes of political chaos, but in the Discourses he seemed to favor a republican form of government, suggesting that government by the people was more likely to be free from abuse than was government by a prince.
To Machiavelli, it was not the form of authority but its techniques that determined the durability of a state. Governmental decisions must be based solely on the interest of the state. Whereas one was morally bound in private affairs, in matters of state no moral considerations could be allowed. Machiavelli’s open advocacy of the use of harsh methods, if necessary, to preserve the state brought him notoriety as a political thinker, but more important for the development of political theory was his conception of the state as an independent entity with its own principles of operation.
New attitudes, ideas, and techniques poured forth from Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the visual arts. As in philosophy, the general cultural currents of the Italian Renaissance and the genius of a number of artists gave rise to new styles and themes that represented a break with the medieval past. The first major departure from the medieval tradition was the concept of a painting as a window through which a three-dimensional scene is visible, rather than as an opaque surface offering only two-dimensional effects. The Florentine artist Giotto (died 1336) moved significantly away from two-dimensional symbols, representing his figures not as flat images but as rounded beings related to each other in space. The Florentine school of painters soon leaped ahead of the rest of Italy in artistic production, and some of the artists made significant technical contributions, but Giotto had no outstanding immediate successor. In fact, in the latter part of the fourteenth century there was a marked reversion to a more medieval type of perspective and theme, perhaps in reaction to the Black Death and the financial crisis of that period. At the end of the century, after a definite interruption, painters again took up the new style where Giotto had left it and advanced Giotto’s experiments.
The concept of depth, or perspective, was developed in Italy and passed on to the miniature painters of France and the Low Countries, to become one of the elements of the International Gothic style that predominated throughout Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. In the first half of the fifteenth century a more far-reaching departure from medieval style took place with the formalization of the mathematical theory of perspective by another generation of great artists. This step was first taken by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and further developed by Leon Battista Alberti (died 1472), who used the theories of classical art and architecture as the basis for extensive writings on the techniques of composition and construction. Henceforth, perspective was considered a mathematical problem that could be solved in a precise manner. For the approximation of perspective by the ancients and the crude attempts at representing depth by Byzantine and Romanesque artists, the Renaissance artists substituted theoretical and technical knowledge that allowed them to represent perspective accurately. Romanesque and Byzantine traditions retained an important place in Renaissance art, and the innovations of great Flemish painters like the Master of Flemalle, Jan van Eyck, and Roger van der Weyden were assimilated by the Italian artists.
Renaissance classicism in art was a complex phenomenon whose contours were shaped by the interaction of the genius of a number of great artists and by various currents of classical and contemporary influence. The interrelationship between the different forms of artistic endeavor—architecture, sculpture, and painting—had a profound impact on the course of this development. The impact of the classical conception of form and subject was first seen in sculpture and architecture. The figures in Ghiberti’s east doors of the baptistery in Florence (later called The Gates of Paradise) are scriptural in subject but genuinely classical in style and mood. The statue of David by Donatello (1386–1466) is in many ways a monument to the spirit of classicism. David is one of many statues of the hero who slew Goliath—an extremely popular theme in Florentine art—but it is revolutionary as a study of the nude human form, a masterful example of the ideal of natural grace, realistically portrayed, which characterized ancient sculpture.
As architects, Brunellischi and Alberti, whose works on perspective had such an important impact on Italian art, studied ancient writings, as well as the ruins of the ancient world that were omnipresent in Rome. Developments in architecture were characterized by the incorporation of classical forms, such as the dome of the cathedral at Florence by Brunelleschi and the use of the triumphal arch in the façade of the cathedral at Rimmini by Alberti. Renaissance architects worked within carefully established principles of proportion and construction, based upon classical models. Gothic cathedrals were in a sense never finished; succeeding generations continued to make whatever accretions they found useful and desirable, and the result was often the juxtaposition of several different architectural styles and a huge building whose general outlines obeyed no set rules of proportion or construction. The Renaissance church, on the other hand, was a unified structure in which the principles of symmetry and harmony precluded the miscellany of Gothic architecture.
Much of the early influence of classicism in painting came as a result of the incorporation of concepts borrowed from sculpture. Masaccio’s portrayal of St. John disrobing in the desert is an example of a representation of the human figure which is fundamentally sculptural and classical in conception. The increasing realism that characterized the treatment of the human form and face found its inspiration in the examples provided by sculpture and by the Flemish painters, who developed the techniques of portraiture.
The most important step toward the assimilation of an overriding classical spirit into painting was taken not in Rome or Florence, but in the northern part of Italy. The painter Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) moved away from the Gothic and Netherlandish tradition to a harsh naturalism. The background to his figures is filled not with delicate detail, but with barren rocks and leafless trees. In his painting of the Crucifixion, the harsh, rocky background reinforces the agony of Christ on the cross and the desolation of the mourners below.
The high point of the development of Renaissance painting did not come until the late fifteenth century in the work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Leonardo was a kind of universal genius who dabbled in almost every aspect of learning. To his patrons he advertised his proficiency in painting, in the construction of siege machines, and in many other fields. His notebooks contain speculations on anatomy, biology, and aeronautics, as well as on new techniques of painting. His experimental bent led him to try new ways of producing paint, but the medium he used was not durable, and a number of his paintings deteriorated. However, his experiments also resulted in the development of the technique of blending light and dark colors known as sfumato, so beautifully exhibited in the Virgin of the Rocks.
Leonardo’s genius extended far beyond the technical aspects of his art. The subtle shades of expression on the faces he portrayed first made his work outstanding. His Mona Lisa is only the most famous example of his ability to portray human character. In The Last Supper, Leonardo took a decisive step forward in his solution of the problem of composition. In most paintings of that famous scene, the impression is simply one of a group of holy men, usually with Judas sitting across the table to symbolize his separation from the rest of the apostles. Leonardo’s Last Supper is composed of groups of figures whose facial expressions illustrate their relationship to the central figure, Christ. For example, Judas sits beside Christ, his posture and expression revealing the horror with which he contemplates the crime he will commit.
Leonardo articulated the underlying spirit of Renaissance art by asserting that a painting ought to be judged by its verisimilitude with the object or scene portrayed. His anatomical studies gave him a new understanding of the structure of the human body, and unlike most of his contemporaries, he used real models to portray accurately the folds of garments and other details.
The achievements of Renaissance art cannot be delineated by a description of the work of its greatest artists; it was the scope and volume of artistic endeavor that marked the era as paramount in the history of art. The names of hundreds of artists fill in the contours of the complex development that took place in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Many who would have stood out from their contemporaries as artistic giants in any other period appear as minor figures in the Renaissànce. Concomitant to the expansion of artistic endeavor was the vastly increased demand for all kinds of art by cities, rich men, and popes in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy. The artist had hitherto been an anonymous craftsman in the service of the church, possibly with some patronage from nobles or kings. The Italian artist of the Renaissance remained a craftsman in many respects, often working as a painter, sculptor, or architect upon demand and even producing more marginal artistic works, such as decorative pieces; but the value that the Renaissance placed upon art and artistic achievement elevated his social position. The successful artist became a man of wealth and fame who could take his place in the upper ranks of society.
It is difficult to find in Renaissance culture a particular theory or principle that is wholly original. The leading tenets of the Renaissance view of man, society, and the universe can be found in various strains of the classical and medieval traditions. But this derivative quality of the particular ingredients of Renaissance culture does not detract from the achievement of the Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Renaissance artists and writers sifted and scrutinized the classical and medieval traditions for the best that had been thought and said in the world and synthesized the ideas that seemed most in accordance with the nature of humanity into an integrated philosophy and style of life that dominated the culture of the early modern world. During the three centuries after 1500, western civilization lived off the intellectual capital of the Italian Renaissance, and the philosophy, political theory, art, and literature of the early modern world were extrapolations from one or another aspect of Renaissance culture.
Even in the modern industrial society of the past century, the humanist tradition that was crystallized in Renaissance Italy had been the essential core of the higher culture of the West. Modern society has spawned a mass culture that departs from Renaissance humanism in significant ways, and modern thought in the realms of science, social theory, and psychology has opened vistas that were largely beyond the ken of fifteenth-century Italian thinkers. But these new doctrines have not been integrated into a systematic theory and style of life that can compete with the humanist tradition in unity and completeness.
The most significant achievement of the Italian Renaissance was its establishment of a culture that suited the way of life of the now-literate nobility and the now-leisured high bourgeoisie while perpetuating most of what was valuable in classical and medieval civilization. Put another way, Renaissance culture allowed the lord or businessman to believe that his pursuit of power, status, and wealth was justified, that he had a right to indulge his feelings. But at the same time it placed these private interests and individual sensibilities within the context of a universal and political order and directed them to social needs. This was no mean achievement: Indeed, this balance—tense or even awkward as it may often be—is fundamental to modern life and is why the Italian Renaissance may rightly be regarded as the dawn of the modern world, even though the humanist scholars failed to reach modern science and the Italian merchants and entrepreneurs did not attain the Industrial Revolution.
Looked at from the other direction, classical culture and medieval culture both fell short of harmonizing private interests and personal sensibilities with social concerns and the natural order, although they included all these ingredients. Faced with individualism, both classical and medieval society tended to panic, to try to force the individual back into the community or subject him to hierarchical authority. The Athenians executed Socrates, and medieval society abused Abelard, but Renaissance Italians lionized Petrarch and Lorenzo de’Medici. This bald contrast is justified insofar as we may conclude from it that Renaissance culture was not necessarily more productive of individuality and sensibility than was classical or medieval culture, but that it was more prepared to come to terms with individualism; to accord it an impregnable value; and to believe optimistically that it could enrich society and illuminate natural order, rather than threaten them.
Renaissance culture deserves to be termed “secular,” although not in the sense that the humanists were unbelievers or anticlerical even in fundamental matters. The humanists were critical of “the shallow Churchman,” as Aeneas Silvius (Pope Pius II), himself a great humanist, said. The humanists were themselves generally well trained in theology and scholasticism. They thought that the intellectuals of the church had become abstract and narrow, divorced from the reality of human love for God. They believed that many bishops were corrupt and disgracefully ignorant. However, this belief did not make them enemies of the church; it made them passionate advocates of the renewal and modernization of the church.
Yet Renaissance culture must be termed secular because it gave value to man’s secular concerns and finally justified worldly endeavor not as a regrettable weakness, but as something fundamental to and glorious in human life. Modernity required this celebration of man’s involvement with his feelings and his participation in nature and society. Medieval men could never quite escape from a sense of guilt, or at least regret, about their natural, secular actions; Renaissance culture was a liberation from this guilt and restraint.
The advance toward a new secular culture that liberated and justified sensibility was inaugurated by the romantic revolution of the twelfth century. But there is certainly a heightened and more explicit expression of this attitude in Dante’s writings. Petrarch confronted the antagonism between soul and body, between the spiritual and secular worlds, between the Christian and classical traditions, more directly than did Dante. Although he described this conflict in apologetic and guilt-ridden terms, he could not deny that he was intensely conscious of his total humanity:
My incorruptible treasure and the superior part of my soul is with Christ; but because of the frailties and burdens of mortal life. . . . I cannot, I confess, lift up, however ardently I should wish, the inferior parts of my soul . . . and cannot make them cease to cling to earth. [Trans. E. Cassirer]
For Petrarch, classical culture was the road to emancipation from the trammels that medieval theology placed upon human nature. For him, ancient Rome was the generator and symbol of a better society and a more humane philosophy than that which prevailed in his own day. His desire for a fuller and finer appreciation of human life is expressed in a longing for return of the Golden Age of the Roman Empire:
Verily Rome was greater, and its remains are greater, than I had supposed. I marvel now, not that the world was conquered by this city, but that it was conquered so late. [Trans. E. H. Tatham]
By the fifteenth century the philosophy of humanism, expressed paradoxically by Dante and defensively by Petrarch, was unequivocally enunciated in Florence’s intellectual circles. Never before or since has the dignity of man been more emphatically stressed than in Pico’s oration on this theme:
I have come to understand why man is the most fortunate of creatures and consequently worthy of all admiration and what precisely is that rank which is his lot in the universal chain of Being—a rank to be envied not only by the brutes but even by the stars and by minds beyond this world. . . . Man is rightly called and judged a great miracle and a wonderful creature indeed. . . . The saying . . . “know thyself” urges and encourages us to the investigation of all nature, of which the nature of man is both the connecting link and, so to speak, the “mixed bowl.” For he who knows himself knows all things. . . . [Trans. E. Cassirer]
Pico retained the ancient and medieval doctrine of the great chain of being, but he rejected the implication of that doctrine by using it to point not to man’s limitations, but to just the opposite. Since man stands at the center of the chain of being, he combines all things in the universe in himself. Man is the most wonderful and complete of all creatures. To understand human nature is to know all things. Man is not only the measure of all things; he is an end in himself, and to cultivate human qualities is to feel and understand the universe. No more radical celebration of humanity has ever been made.
We have arrived at the theory of liberal humanism, which holds that the resources of human society are so vast as to be virtually unlimited. There is no need for violence, poverty, and misery in society because the human mind is powerful enough to devise remedies for these ills and to establish a community in which all men will have the freedom to cultivate the sublime and beautiful that are potential in every human being.
If one looks for the essence of Italian Renaissance humanism, one finds it in the field of education. Both the pedagogical theory and the curriculum that prevailed in Italian humanist circles in the fifteenth century exclusively dominated European education to the end of the nineteenth century, and the humanist influence is still crucial in our better schools and universities. As against the medieval university, the humanists contended that the liberal arts should be not a cursory preparation for advanced professional studies, but the main concern of any educational institution. Through the development of the mind in literary—chiefly classical—studies, the student would be so equipped with broad knowledge and wisdom, and his reason and feelings would be so finely tuned, that he could undertake any further investigation he wanted.
Put in today’s terms, the humanist view of education is that universities should be concerned with teaching and communicating with undergraduates. Professors should be excellent teachers, with broad interests. The curriculum should be concerned with the culture of the past and problems of the present and should be directly relevant to the student’s professional experience and social commitment. Research and professional training should either be assigned a decidedly secondary role on the campus, relegated to separate institutes or professional schools, or abandoned as socially useless or reactionary. The struggle in the universities between the humanists and the “scholastics,” as Petrarch called them, still goes on.
The Renaissance humanists often despaired of reforming the universities with their entrenched faculty devoted to specialized research and narrow professional training. They turned their attention to secondary education and reformed or newly established preparatory schools—nearly always for boys only—for students aged eight to sixteen. These schools were where the mind of the new generation could be molded in language and literature, in ethics and history, and prepared for leadership in diverse careers and callings.
The curriculum and pedagogy that the Renaissance humanists had established all over western Europe by 1500 was the foundation of the French lycée, the German gymnasium, and the English “public” (nonclerical) school of modern times. In these schools was crystallized the cultural heritage of the classical and medieval worlds that achieved a universe of discourse, a common language (usually Latin and French), and a standardized symbolic culture in which the European elite from Edinburgh to Warsaw, from Stockholm to Naples, was trained in the next half millennium. Combined with continued faith in the Christian tradition as articulated by Augustine, as communicated in Jerome’s Bible, as rationalized by Thomism, as synthesized by Dante, this was to be the essence of western civilization down to the early decades of the twentieth century. Although eroded at the edges, challenged by radical political and cultural ideals, damaged by materialism and democracy, this medieval heritage, transmitted through Renaissance humanism and its educational and literate traditions, had not lost its intrinsic vitality and social value at the end of the second Christian millennium.
The cultivation of the Italian Renaissance in the age of Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci, around 1500, has traditionally been regarded as the endpoint of the Middle Ages. There are several additional justifications for viewing 1500 as the termination of the medieval era. The “splitting of the faith,” as the Germans call it, the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, and the permanent division of the western Church, was also about to begin. By 1500 the transatlantic colonial penetration of the Americas by the Iberian peoples was under way. Following upon their successful circumnavigation of Africa and the opening up of India and the Far East to European trade, it meant a radical turning away from a cultural and mercantile focus on the Mediterranean and a drastic alteration in the pattern of the European economy. By 1500 the printing press with movable type, which had been introduced in Germany around 1470, was being widely employed. A revolution in communication was under way.
These are all good reasons to regard the end of the fifteenth century as the end of the Middle Ages, just as the accession of a Christian Roman emperor in the early fourth century marks the beginning of medieval times. But just as the medieval beginning can also be claimed to lie with the barbarian invasions of the early fifth century, so can not-absurd arguments be made for other dates to mark the end of the Middle Ages, all the way from the French monarchy’s destruction of the papacy in the early fourteenth century to the political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century.
In determining the start and end of eras, there is room for diverse judgments. But all things considered, there are grounds for thinking of 1500 as the most conceptually persuasive medieval terminus. The increased secularism of Renaissance learning, coupled with the reivified monarchial states and their ruthless exercise of the balance of power, the Protestant Reformation, the introduction of the printing press, the migrations, imperialism, and economic changes attendant upon overseas ventures to the Americas and East Asia, determined structural and cultural changes of major proportions that deeply penetrated the institutional formation and the mentality of the European peoples. What Johan Huizinga said in 1919 of the end of the fifteenth century remains true:
A high and strong culture is declining, but at the same time and in the same sphere new things are being born. The tide is turning, the tone of life is about to change.
In the past three decades, aside from much attention to family and woman’s history, research and publication in the medieval field concentrated primarily on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This focus has been partly for professional reasons. In European archives are several tons of unpublished manuscripts, records, and books of the period 1270–1500, and provided that they can read the difficult script of the period, Ph.D. candidates who are seeking subjects for dissertations or untenured assistant professors who need to write a quick second book, working from unpublished materials is prudent because anything coherent reported in them meets academic requirements of a contribution to knowledge. Furthermore, those who conduct research in Florence, Venice, Paris, or London can get research grants to live in a desirable place for a year or two.
There are, however, intrinsic intellectual reasons for this recent intensive work on the late Middle Ages. So little was known three decades ago about that era, and it seemed so important as a transition to the culture and society of the sixteenth century that was widely assumed to be the start of the modern world (an assumption no longer secure), that the sinking of deep research shafts in one, often relatively narrow aspect of the late Middle Ages was amply justified.
The quality of detailed research on the late Middle Ages is high, but the overall result has been disappointing. No paradigm or overall interpretation of the period 1270–1500 has yet been offered that integrates the multiple facets of the culture and society of western Europe. Even in the richly explored Italian Renaissance, historians are still mulling over the paradigms propounded by Jacob Burckhardt in I860 and Erwin Panofsky in the 1950s, rather than formulating new models. The two most interesting general views on the late Middle Ages (neither translated into English) remain the books of Rudolf Stadelman (1928) and Augustin Renaudet (1939). Perhaps the comprehensive overview propounded in these older books was attainable precisely because their authors were not distracted by a flood of detailed monographs and could reflect on the general perspectives.
Without a new paradigm that integrates diverse aspects of the late Middle Ages, there remain seven obvious paradoxes in the history of that era. The first paradox is in the political sphere. In the late Middle Ages there was plenty of discussion of what we call constitutional liberalism and a much greater visibility of a high bourgeoisie, who were the most persistent advocates and implementors of this progressive doctrine in later centuries. Yet the main trend in late medieval political life was the resurgence of aristocratic power and the high visibility of the great nobles in politics and government. In other words, neither the rebellions of peasants and artisans nor middle-class constitutionalism had a significant political outcome. Europe’s political system remained hierarchic and oligarchic, and the hierarchies and oligarchs became more prominent on the political scene between 1270 and 1500. At the end of the period, European monarchs were still regularly enriching and yielding power to the high nobility. Even in Italy the great merchant families modeled their political behavior on the northern grandees (and the ancient Roman aristocracy), and far from seeking to introduce constitutional liberalism and a modicum of representative democracy, they turned themselves into hereditary nobility.
The second paradox was in the social sphere. The Black Death, which carried off 25–40 percent of the population, created a labor shortage, ended the vestiges of serfdom in western Europe, and increased the number of wealthy peasant families. The demographic collapse alleviated the slowly developing food shortage that the overpopulated Europe of the early fourteenth century had experienced. But aside from this consequence, the biomedical holocaust had no impact. It should have inspired a vast theological and moral literature probing the meaning of the disaster. There was almost none of that. Instead there was the Decameron, in which the Black Death served as the pretext for entertainment and softcore pornography.
The third paradox of late medieval history concerns the church. There were enormous learning, intelligence, organizational skill, and speculative imagination of all kinds in the late medieval church. Intrinsically the church was not in decline. In terms of brainpower, information, and literary and artistic capability, it was on the upswing, if anything. Yet the church could not resolve its basic institutional problems, either at the papal level or at the local level, where a variety of parsons and friars competed intensely with one another and brought lay opprobrium on themselves.
The fourth paradox also involves the church. Never before and rarely since was there such intense evangelical feeling and popular enthusiasm about the Christian message among ordinary people. Instead of exulting in and channeling this piety and devotion, the top structure of European intellectuals in the late fifteenth century chose to condemn it as being infected with superstition and idolatry and formulated programs to eradicate much of it in the name of purifying reforms.
The fifth paradox again refers to the intellectuals and scholars. There was intense cultivation of every aspect of classical learning except the two that would have had the greatest social impact—mathematical literacy and republicanism. The former would have ignited the scientific revolution, the latter a democratic upheaval.
The sixth paradox refers to the learned professions. The legal profession became thoroughly professionalized, and English common law assumed the organizational form and behavior patterns that still exist in the United States and Canada, as well as in Britain, for better or worse. Physicians and surgeons made no progress in their professional standing or in improving their contribution to society. Instead they did a lot of damage. Panicked by the Black Death, whose cause mystified them, they convinced Europeans to close their windows and sheath them with heavy drapes to keep out the “bad air” that, they alleged, brought plague and to stop taking baths, which, they claimed, opened the pores to the dread disease. This quack medicine was not completely revised until the twentieth century.
The seventh paradox was ecological. Europeans had lived in the midst of vast forests throughout the earlier medieval centuries. After 1250 they became so skilled in deforestation that by 1500 they were running short of wood for heating and cooking. They were faced with a nutritional decline because of the elimination of the generous supply of wild game that had inhabited the now-disappearing forests, which throughout medieval times had provided the staple of their carnivorous high-protein diet. By 1500 Europe was on the edge of a fuel and nutritional disaster for which it was saved in the sixteenth century only by the burning of soft coal (which, in turn, started air pollution) and the cultivation of potatoes and maize (Indian corn as fodder for cattle) that were imported from America.
These paradoxes make the late Middle Ages an intriguing but not an edifying sight. They can be viewed, indeed, as the start of “early modern Europe,” which continued until the political, industrial, and liberal and scientific revolutions of the eighteenth century. This early Modern Europe continued to be marked by the paradoxes, confusions, and crises that distinguished the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Because of the disorder of the period 1300–1500, those who admire the medieval heritage and seek some kind of revival of medievalism in our time look to the earlier centuries from St. Augustine and St. Benedict to St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Thomas Aquinas for inspiration, contrasted with the materialism and decadence of the closing years of the twentieth century. They see in the medieval centuries a society in which people’s lives were rarely programmed by the centralizing bureaucratic state and in which people therefore had to make their own decisions, communal and personal, without the dictates of political and legal power. They see a culture that arose out of chaos, violence, and cruelty by the application of learned intelligence to social behavior. They see a world that recognized the capacity of individuals to love God and human beings and turned this love into wonderful artistic and literary expressions. They see a world that used reason and tradition to integrate society with the environment and created prosperous and stable communities. They look to the medievalism of those times for a model of religious devotion and moral commitment that led also to the founding of great universities and the support of learning, art, and imaginative literature.
The medieval world we know was far from perfect. Life expectancy was short, and disease was mostly incontestable. It was a world burdened by royal autocracy and social hierarchy inherited from ancient times. Its piety and devotion were affected by fanaticism and a potential for persecution. Its intellectuals were given to too abstract and not enough practical thinking. But it exhibited as elevated a culture, as peaceful a community, as benign a political system, as high-minded and popular a faith as the world has ever seen.
In the 1990s there is a difference of opinion among scholars as to when this good and beautiful Middle Ages ended. The Austrian liberal Catholic historian Frederick Heer proposed in the late 1950s that 1200 was the medieval dividing line between expansionary freedom and contracting repression. A younger generation of historians, including R. I. Moore and Jeffrey Richards in Britain and John Boswell in the United States, have confirmed this dividing line on the ground that around 1200 medieval Europe became what Moore dramatically termed a persecuting society. It is asserted that at the beginning of the thirteenth century the repressive marginalization of what are today called minorities—heretics, Jews, women, lepers, witches, and homosexuals—was much intensified and draconically institutionalized.
This book has recognized this contracting aspect of thirteenth-century culture and society. But it has also regarded the effort of Innocent III’s papacy politically, Thomas Aquinas intellectually, and the Franciscans emotionally to fashion a new consensus down to around 1270 as still within the continuing parameters of a creative and expansive central era in medieval culture. It is possible that had this consensus been realized and built upon in the late Middle Ages that in time open horizons would have prevailed and the persecuting tendencies would have been mitigated. But after 1270 things fell apart, and the medieval center no longer held. Thus, in spite of remarkable efforts at constitutional liberalism in the late Middle Ages and the progressive qualities of Renaissance humanism, what, from our perspective, was a confrontational and authoritarian intolerance toward minorities did indeed flow out of social anxiety and political rationalization soon after 1200 and was not reversed.
Therefore, arguments that are derived from different criteria can lead, with equal persuasiveness, to the conclusion that the good and beautiful Middle Ages ended either around 1200 or 1270. At some point in the thirteenth century Europe entered a time of disintegration and conflict that, by 1500, had brought about the waning of medieval civilization.